In New Agenda Issue Number 80, the head of the National School of Government Prof. Busani Ngcaweni and Jacqueline Nkate Deputy Director: Knowledge Management at the National School of Government address the question of how to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 and opine on the options for economic revival in South Africa.
Mariana Mazzucato in the mission economy debunks the myth of a binary of government is bad and private sector is good. The logical conclusion of this myth is to allocate a small government role in delivery of programmes and the rest to be left to the private sector for the market.
This is a very sad Milton Friedman’s market fundamentalist approach to development that has plagued South Africa as well. That the government swelled in wanton corruption, lends credence to Friedman’s private sector objective and the rationale for the free market as the only rational arbiter to allocation of resources.
There is no doubt that those who have questioned Friedman’s approach to development feel vindicated in the context of COVID-19. Their view is emboldened against the false approaches that favoured business in the 2008 financial and economic crisis.
They see COVID-19 as a gift to exposing this myth. It is in this context that Ngcaweni is correct in locating the mission of the National School of Government in this raging discourse of an existential threat which in the case of South Africa is precipitated by this wanton corruption.
The point of departure for Ngcaweni and Nkate in their own words “draws on recent working papers from the National Planning Commission, the authors argue that rebuilding state capacity should be prioritised as part of South Africa’s economic recovery plan.
Boosting infrastructure and promoting manufacturing present viable opportunities for reviving the economy, but bureaucratic and other systemic and institutional inefficiencies will have to be addressed. The authors put forward their recommendations to tackle constraints on growth.” Whilst this is important, it remains a simple regurgitation of things that necessarily have to be done, but fails to problematize this with empirical studies and contributions made by Mazzucato.
In this regard Mazzucato, M., Qobo, M. and Kattel, R. Building state capacities and dynamic capabilities to drive social and economic development: The case of South Africa, the authors assert that the role of the state is not that of game watching but that of an active participant. The role of the state is not a market fixer waiting to fix what goes wrong in markets but its role is that of a co-creator and shaper.
Against this advice by Mazzucato et al, Ngcaweni and Nkate have shown little imagination in looking into the Reconstruction and Recovery Plan which is anchored mainly in the reforms including the current charge of selling off state assets.
The reconstruction and recovery plan has given impact targets which unfortunately by any stretch of the imagination cannot reduce unemployment, inequality and poverty. In fact except for rhetoric of saying these will address the current crisis, the evidence in the modelled estimates only show that employment creation will not go beyond two to three million by 2030 with growth just hovering around 3%.
By all counts this will not address the ills of the triple challenge of poverty, unemployment and inequality. The School of Government and its participants as the nexus of theory and practice, armed with these facts must ask the difficult questions of path dependency of neo liberalism.
Indlulamithi Scenarios articulate three paths of Gwara-Gwara which is a land of hopelessness and disorder, Isibujwa which is the trickle down economics of Friedman and Nayi le Walk which provides a heterodox road map of South Africa towards a better future.
These scenarios provide a spectrum of options that the School of Government in executing its mission of an empowered civil service can use for policy choices to be made. Mazzucato et al in their paper make the following observation on the District Development Model “There are, however, limitations with the district development model…..This is not to suggest that an alternative framework to the existing district development model should be invented; rather, that the scope of its focus needs to be broadened in order to tackle the more deep-rooted problems, instead of making small fixes around coordination.”
Ngcaweni and Nkate have shown courage to look into policy matters beyond public service procedures, however, they fall far short by not rigorously confronting the policy chasms that the South Africa Reconstruction and Recovery Plan portends. It is not about small fixes. It is about fundamental and audacious intellectual and practical interventions by the School of Government .
Dr Pali Lehohla is the former statistician-general and former head of Statistics South Africa.
*The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL or of title sites
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